States of Knowledge

A sophisticated psychology would have a “science of states,” thus of states of mind or of consciousness. Some traditions have developed to include this science; an example is Sufism (where I first encountered that phrase). We don’t find it in the West. An obscure nineteenth century American lawyer and philosopher, Daniel Greenleaf Thompson (1850-1897) called for such a science (“Science of States of Consciousness”) in his A System of Psychology (1884, link), but, as I say, he was obscure. How do I define that? Well, there is no Wikipedia article on him. Nobody took up his challenge. But what are they, those states? And where am I going with this?

We use the word to describe states of awakeness, sleep, alertness, concentration, daydreaming, emotional, dreaming, hypnagogic, ecstatic, delusional, and so on. In the Sufi view, these are all aspects of the first, and lowest, state of humanity. Above it rise six others, each a higher state than the ordinary one of being human (link). We think that we are finished when we haven’t even started growing yet. Where am I going? I want to point to the difficulties in looking at various visionary reports, dreaming included but beyond that, without the help of a much more sophisticated understanding of how the human mind behaves above (or below) the level of ordinary consciousness.

The big chasm that appears in such reports is one between cognitive states and the emotional. The first is centered, the other is in motion. People report ecstatic feeling, not least the feeling of understanding everything, but they emerge from these states knowing absolutely nothing new;  they retain a memory of the ecstatic feeling, however, and it signals that all is well in the universe. But is that enough?  Negative experiences are occasionally reported; in these, also, there is little or no content. I recall reading, with sharp interest, a Sufi tale some years ago in which a master chides a disciple when hearing an ecstatic report. Ecstasy? No. It’s a sign of insufficient development. Back to the workbench with you. The knowledge that informed the master here came from understanding the various “states” from his own experience. The developed state, in Sufism, is “to have the option.” The person must be centered and “all there.” Being carried in a maelstrom of emotion is to be passive. Understanding must be present—and free choice. If the cognitive is overwhelmed, the seeker isn’t there yet.

I also note that the Catholic Church echoes the Sufi master’s attitude by displaying wariness concerning ecstasies and caution about mysticism as a general approach. Pop culture, a culture of emotion and of going with the flow, doesn’t like this stance. It sounds authoritarian—whereas it may simply be knowing.

The sharp if simplifying distinction I am making here, between cognitive development and emotional highs and lows, helps in sorting what is today a popular but fringe literature on “spiritual” or “cosmic” states, the paranormal, near-death experience reports, etc. The cognitive, of course, is not merely the intellectual, but the intellectual must be present at its base; and there are also modes of perception that are labeled “emotional” when they hold a higher form of experience, joy. Not that geography really applies here, but in the regions beyond the borderzone, there are most likely qualitatively different regions, from low to increasingly higher coherence. And to travel through them successfully, a good inner map is helpful, a grasp of the different states, principally studied by self-observation in the here and now.

Related Posts:

Mystical Experiences

A Closer Look at Ecstasy